2022 Mayacamas Vineyards Chardonnay

Although the fame of its Cabernet has eclipsed that of its white wine, Mayacamas’s early reputation was built on the back of its Chardonnay. The estate’s original owner, Jack Taylor, planted the first Chardonnay vines in the 1950s when there were as few as 150 acres spread across California. Since then, the vines have been replanted with the classic US Wente clone and a smattering of Dijon. Since Bob Travers’s time, through precise picking and inhibiting malolactic fermentation, the style has hinged on youthful tension and ripe-fruited intensity before the wine takes on an unexpected opulence with age. Mayacamas’s five Chardonnay blocks are scattered throughout the 50-acre Mount Veeder vineyard and sit on various soil profiles—volcanic ash, gravelly loam, cobbled clay—at different elevations, ranging from 550 to 640 metres. Each block is picked separately in the cool early morning, and multiple passes are made to ensure only perfectly ripe, healthy fruit makes the cut. In the cellar, the fruit is hand-sorted and pressed predominantly as whole clusters (95%) at very low pressure. The juice is cold-settled and racked to stainless steel and old barrels (including 500-litre puncheons and 1000-litre foudre) for a long, cool primary fermentation. Importantly—and unusually for the region—malolactic fermentation is inhibited at Mayacamas; it has been this way since the Bob Travers days from the 1970s to the 2000s. While many on Mount Veeder have replaced all or most of their Chardonnay with the more profitable Bordeaux varieties, Mayacamas has stuck to its guns. It is not hard to see why.